[web3isgoing]

ZK is old tech but succinct, non-interactive and general purpose ZK is not. Look at SNARK and STARK, and every other research and advancement in the last 5 years. Funded by blockchain, developed for blockchain, with hash functions optimized for use in a blockchain. This modern form of ZK underpins most new blockchain bridges, light clients, and scalability solutions.

These new ZK proofs are much different than anything in the last decades, and can be used without a blockchain. But they also do fit elegantly within the context of blockchains, like having a ZKP verifier running on EVM instead of a single website like keybase.io, to further reduce points of centralization.

[drdrek]

"ZK is old tech but succinct, non-interactive and general purpose ZK is not." Do you work on SNARK? this is just their marketing language reiterated.

Zero knowledge proofs do not need to be "small". What kind of ZKP use-case do imagine that cannot bother to send 1kb of additional data? What does any of this have to do with decentralization? Why is decentralization a goal? Do you really believe that most research into ZK cryptography is funded by blockchain?

Try and expand your sources of information, I have a feeling that you are in an internet bubble :(

[web3isgoing]

Succinctness means the proof size is smaller than the witness, and that it can be verified quickly. So your proof size and verification time can remain small even with large inputs. Succinctness and SNARK is the basis for practical verifiable computation systems like Pinocchio[1], early applications like Zerocoin, and now is the basis for scaling blockchains with ZK rollups.

See for yourself[2]. Much of the recent developments of practical ZKP stems from SNARK. In the last few years there has been an explosion of new papers and tools around this - lots of it driven by blockchain and in some cases directly funded by it.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/279.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#Zero-Know...